To the average person, the tendency is to think when you have two planes go down within minutes of each other after taking off from the same airport, there’s got to be a connection. But, as experienced pilots related today, that’s not necessarily the case.

Today, the Brown County Airport was as still as the August air.

The two aviation fuel pumps normally used by pilots there were shut as the FAA started its painstaking investigative work.

What caused 46-year-old Timothy Howser’s Cessna 150 to go down near Russellville at 8:04 p.m. and 42-year-old Kristopher Cooper’s experimental aircraft to crash land roughly three minutes later is as unknown as it is unusual.

Doug Rogers, who has commercial and military flight experience and has used the Brown County Airport for 17 years, has heard all the speculation about the fuel and whether it played a part.

But, it appears the two pilots refueled from different tanks before taking off.

“Someone pumped up fuel just minutes before those individuals and they flew around here and was flying and they didn’t have any problems. So, you throw that into the mix,” said Rogers.

Veteran pilot Charlie McKinney, who lives in close proximity to the airport and has built five planes and two helicopters, figures this will turn out to be mechanical.

The Brown County Pilots Association is in the process of sending a sample from the lowest point of the tanks to the FAA.

“We have a means of sumping our tank to make positive that we do not have any water or anything like that, or impurities in our tanks. And they’ve requested a sample,” said McKinney.

Pilots we spoke with today state with conviction the airport is a safe one and well-run.

They expressed no reservations about flying out of there again.

It’s not known how long it will be before the fuel tanks get the ok to be used again. But the Brown County Pilot’s Association was hoping the green light would come soon. As for the formal findings, FAA investigations typically last several weeks, sometimes months.